I was searching for categories for my WIPs yesterday and happened upon Genre Fiction --> Political --> New Release. Check these out. They don't even bother with title, author, name anymore, and content is all mumble-jumble. The book "usmiisusiv" by Oduvanck Cvetilov has 2967 pages. Oduvanck Cvetilov is a prolific author with 10+ books of the same kind in his backlog. (See? Who says an author can't publish a book a month? Or a book a week? Heck, he probably publishes a book an hour.) All his books use the same cover. (Good idea! Great for branding and saves a lot of $$. Why didn't I think of that?)

But author Jaratik Garbichnikin, author of "yaormuvuad" does him one better. "yaormuvuad" doesn't even have a book cover. "yaormuvuad" is an epic novel that is 4156 pages long. Here's the riveting blurb:

yaormuvuad

I wanted to Look Inside but unfortunately there's no such option without the cover. I guess we'll just have to assume it's a masterpiece.

"yaormuvuad" is an epic novel that is 4156 pages long. Here's the riveting blurb:

yaormuvuad

I wanted to Look Inside but unfortunately there's no such option without the cover. I guess we'll just have to assume it's a masterpiece.

Such a shame he won't get paid for the whole last quarter of that masterpiece since they only pay up to 3k 'pages.' I'm sure he thought about splitting the book, but I'm guessing it would've ruined the art of the story to do so. Poor guy, willing to profit so much less for the sake of his art. Now that's dedication.

I'd probably cry if I weren't so busy laughing. This is just...it's just...so laughable in such a cynical way. So. Very. Laughable. We've been going about this all wrong, folks. My next book with feature a solid black cover with the title "Book." The blurb will simply state: "Give me your money cause this little black book rocks."

When I looked it up, it says "English Edition" but the look inside is Russian (or something?). False advertising??

Is it really Russian, or is it gibberish?

Russian isn't one of the supported languages, so I suppose trying to upload a Russian file might lead to weird results, but that doesn't explain uploading the same book multiple times. Nor does it explain why such a mess would rank so high. Only botting seems likely to explain that.

Russian isn't one of the supported languages, so I suppose trying to upload a Russian file might lead to weird results, but that doesn't explain uploading the same book multiple times. Nor does it explain why such a mess would rank so high. Only botting seems likely to explain that.

That's a question for someone who is not me (lol). It would be funny if it turned out to be some really great book in Russian though.

They don't want real readers to find the books and buy them. But a farm of hacked devices and fake KU subs can read through them. Amazon gets paid for the subscriptions and it inflates the reported number of KU subscribers. So there is no compelling reason for them to act.

They don't want real readers to find the books and buy them. But a farm of hacked devices and fake KU subs can read through them. Amazon gets paid for the subscriptions and it inflates the reported number of KU subscribers. So there is no compelling reason for them to act.

Amazon doesn't get paid for these "subscriptions". I'd bet anything these are one-off sign ups with stolen credit card #s for the KU one-month free trial. These guys are smart though. They stay just far down enough on the radar, but high enough to get a piece of the KU payout. I'm betting they make more in KU $$ than I am.

They don't want real readers to find the books and buy them. But a farm of hacked devices and fake KU subs can read through them. Amazon gets paid for the subscriptions and it inflates the reported number of KU subscribers. So there is no compelling reason for them to act.

That's exactly what's going on, IMO. In my preferred genre, these fake books typically make up 1/3 of the top 100 new releases, and one or two crack the top 100 in the genre. The click farmer sometimes get a little over eager and give the scammer a little bit too much love, which raises the risk of getting flagged and reported.

I've studied this scam a little, and I agree, I think its based out of Russia. most of these "authors," to use the term loosely, will post 13 books (not sure it's not 9 or 14, or some other random count) Sometimes the "book" is just a bunch of random English sentences, while other times, it a Russian translation. My favorite, when I was researching, was a cut and paste of one of Baum's Oz books from the 20s.

Nearly all of these so called books range in rank from 10,000-100,000 give or take a zero. Using a click farm to "read" the 2-3,000 word book nets the book somewhere between $8-11 per read, if they don't get caught. For a book to reach 30,000 in ranking (which seems to be the average ranking for many of these so-called books), I'm not sure how many times the book gets downloaded by the clickfarm, but for the sake of the discussion, lets say that represents 10 downloads/reads from a "free KU account. Theoretically, the account could take from the rest of the legitimate KU authors $1500, and in all likelihood, the scammer has several accounts.

Wow. I hope people report this. It might be possible for these scammers to get paid if they did it quickly and quietly, pulled their books after a particular time so they would go under Amazon's insufficient radar. Clearly a sign that Amazon's systems to detect fraud in KU is not working. Think of all the legitimate new releases that get kicked off the charts because of these scam books. Every hour that legitimate books are knocked off the charts is money lost for those authors.

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